Resilient Economy and Society by Integrated SysTems modelling (RESIST)

In the past decades, great progresses have been made in tackling disaster risk around the world especially since the Hyogo Framework for Action in 2005. However, there are still many challenging issues to be solved, and the disasters over recent years have clearly demonstrated the inadequate resilience in our highly interconnected and interdependent systems, including well-known devastating disasters such as the 2008 Wenchuan, 2011 Tohoku and 2015 Nepal Earthquakes.

RESIST have identified the following weaknesses and knowledge gaps in the current disaster risk assessment and management that are in need of urgent research: 1) although our understanding in individual hazards has been greatly improved, there is a lack of sound knowledge about mechanism and processes of interacting multi-hazards (cascading, concurring and altering). Therefore, the resultant multi-hazard risk are often significantly underestimated with severe consequences (e.g., the cascading disasters of 2011 Tohoku Earthquake). It is also poorly understood about the spatial and temporal changes in hazards and vulnerability during successive hazards; 2) hazard monitoring, forecasting and early warning systems have not fully utilised the domain knowledge of physical processes and the statistical information of the observations; 3) uncertainties have not been well recognised in the current risk management practice, and ignorance of uncertainties could lead to major threat to the society and poor consideration with inefficient or unsustainable preferences of options; 4) the current hazard and risk assessments are fragmented with a weakness in holistically combining quantitative and qualitative information from a variety of sources; 5) there is an urgent need for the holistic (i.e., systems) thinking framework and decision support system (DSS) tools in adequate scenario assessment and resilience development from a harmonised and transdisciplinary perspective. It is our ambition for RESIST to deliver a research project that tackles the unsolved issues with a joint effort from a multidisciplinary team in social science, natural science, engineering and systems.

The overall goal of RESIST is set to develop a holistic thinking framework and the next generation systems modelling platform for sustainable economic development considering social welfare and well-being to increase resilience to natural hazards in earthquake-prone regions in China. To achieve this goal, the following objectives are targeted: 1) to develop a Disaster Risk Information System (DRIS) by literature review, field trips, and new observations; 2) to study mechanisms and processes of interacting multi-hazards influenced by earthquakes, climate change and human activities; 3) to analyse holistic disaster risk assessment and mitigation measures; 4) to develop a whole systems resilience modelling platform for sustainable economic development and social welfare.

China is a large country suffering from nearly all natural hazards of varying magnitudes, and the economic and social costs of disasters resulting from earthquakes, landslides, debris flows, and floods are immense. RESIST will contribute to increasing resilience to natural hazards in earthquake prone regions in China by a research partnership between UK and Chinese scientists. The developed new knowledge and models will improve our understanding about disaster risks which will benefit many countries around the world including the UK that suffer from natural hazard threats.

The ODA guidelines specify that the primary purpose for this funding call is to promote the economic development and social welfare in the earthquake prone regions of China. The proposed decision support system will promote economic and welfare development in those regions which is central to building resilience and supporting recovery. Therefore, it is important that the communities in those regions will benefit from the project through a wide range of beneficiaries including policy makers, planners, investors, engineers, as well as local communities. The following activities are planned for the intended impacts to be achieved:
1) for the government policy makers and planners, three consultation workshops are planned in each year of the project. Later on in the 2nd and 3rd years of the project, the policy makers and planners will be presented with the DSS and trained on its use. This will help them understand and test future change scenarios for human and ecological activities through integrated interventions and to assess their economic impacts and to help find comprehensive solutions;
2) for the investors, the DSS will be used to attract innovative sustainable finance at a regional scale, which combines green growth, natural hazard adaptation-mitigation and social impact through public private partnerships. The user interfaces ('cockpits') will access a simulation model of human activities for 'smart' development investment. This activity will be carried out in the 3rd year of the project jointly with the policy makers and planners;
3) for the engineers involving in designing mitigation measures, the sound understanding on optimal utilisation of both structural and non-structural measures underpins effective design of those measures. Consulting engineers in the region will be invited to mitigation workshops in the second and third years of the project to experience the usage of the DSS on assessing different combinations of mitigation measures, and the feedback from them will help the project team to improve the system;
4) for the local community, regular workshops are planned to collect their feedback on the system for improvement using the web-based DSS function. This enables interactive participation of the local citizens in the hazard zones to explore the effects of different mitigation alternatives and learn from the exercise. This will improve the uptake and responses to scientific advice, by developing risk-based approaches to natural hazards in collaboration with the communities at risk;
5) RESIST will develop an early warning system to provide the threatened communities with sufficient time to prepare for appropriate actions and enable earlier interventions. In the 1st year of the project, preliminary assessment of the existing community based early warning system will be carried out. The local citizens will be consulted about their experience and opinions on the hazards in their surrounding areas. The local community knowledge will help the research team to understand the local concerns. A web based early warning system will be developed, and the research team will use its expertise in risk understanding and communication to make the early warning system more relevant and effective in the study area;
6) many countries in the world are facing similar problems as China in dealing with disaster risks; thus the gained experience and knowledge in RESIST is transferable to other parts of the world and this can be simply shared through the open-source concept. The system developed in RESIST will become the first milestone to demonstrate the applicability of an integrated sustainable systems approach to disaster risk management.